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Angela Merkel’s father, Pastor Horst Kasner, was one of the few who answered Hamburg bishop Hans-Otto Wölber’s call to service in the Soviet zone. He was born in Berlin, and studied theology at the Heidelberg University. He never approved of his daughter’s ambition, but he always supported her. Angela Merkel’s father, Pastor Horst Kasner, was one of the few who answered Hamburg bishop Hans-Otto Wölber’s call to service in the Soviet zone. He was born in Berlin, and studied theology at the Heidelberg University. He never approved of his daughter’s ambition, but he always supported her. Angela Merkel, the future German chancellor, grew up in Templin, a town that was occupied by the Soviets during her childhood. The place was quiet and peaceful, and she learned to rely on herself there. When the Kasner family first arrived at Waldhof, they were too poor even to afford a stroller for Angela. They used a converted crate as her crib. Her father was a hard man, but he taught his daughter logical rigor and clarity of argument. When Angela Kasner’s father noticed large rolls of barbed wire stacked in a pine forest along the highway as the family drove from West Germany to East Germany, he knew something was wrong. The Berlin Wall was built to cut East Germany off from West Germany and Europe. Angela had a voracious interest in reading, and she would spend hours on end reading the Russian classics. She found her role model in Marie Curie, the first woman to win not just one but two Nobel Prizes. Merkel’s faith was very different from her father’s more doctrinaire Christianity. She treated faith cautiously, and religion belonged in the private sphere for her. She was not an atheist, but she did not believe in God. Merkel’s caution and need for control were displayed early on, when she would not dive off the diving board at the pool because she was afraid of how far she would fall. She eventually went to Moscow and bought her first Western record. Merkel’s parents were very accommodating to the regime, and she often felt torn between her parents’ different ideologies. She eventually decided to side with her father, who was friendly with the state. Kasner’s blend of political and religious ideology rubbed many the wrong way, and his behavior seemed hypocritical. He refused to acknowledge how much Protestant parents and children were suffering in East Germany. In August 1968, the Soviet Union crushed the liberal experiment of Socialism with a Human Face in Czechoslovakia, making it harder for Pastor Kasner to delude himself about the East German regime’s true nature. Yet Kasner never quite gave up on his dream of a humane socialism. Merkel’s father contacted his bishop, who urged the state to be lenient toward the promising student and her classmates. She was spared, but learned another lesson about the brutality of a state that was willing to cut short a potentially bright future for nothing more than a mild act of mischief.